Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
Fair enough. I certainly agree in principle.
D&D 4E Ben Riggs' "What the Heck Happened with 4th Edition?" seminar at Gen Con 2023
- Thread starter Alzrius
- Start date
darjr
I crit!
Transcript in the spoiler tag.
kriegspiel as it was called by its
prussian inventors had become so complex
that hardly anybody played it the game
was originally designed as a training
tool for young officers but at this
point finding senior officers with
battlefield experience willing to put in
the time to learn the rules and referee
the game had become nearly impossible
lieutenant wilhelm jacob meckle was
dissatisfied with the situation and
identified a number of problems with the
game as it stood first of all the rules
of the game limited the referee a
referee in creek's bill was expected to
be an experienced battlefield officer
whose job was to take the orders sent to
him by the players and then translate
that into action on the game battlefield
however the strictness of the rules of
the game often prevented them from using
that real world experience in
determining the results
secondly he pointed out that the rules
of the game could not even in theory
accurately model the conditions of a
real battlefield the world is infinitely
complex and cannot be reduced down to
just a series of rules players would
always be trying things that were
outside of the rules and situations
would be cropping up that the rules
didn't cover
thirdly the detailed calculations that
the game required were often tedious
they slowed the game down and they
didn't make that much of a difference
anyway occasionally you would run into
these absurd situations where the
playing of the creek spiel the war game
would take longer than fighting the
actual battle in real life to resolve
this mecca proposed eliminating most of
the rules of the game and instead
relying much more heavily on the
battlefield experience of the referee
rather than consulting a lot of charts
and graphs to resolve a situation the
referee would examine what was going on
make a quick ruling based on what they
thought was the most likely outcome and
the game would quickly move on from
there
so this would make the game a lot faster
it would make it a lot more accessible
and hopefully make it more realistic as
well this form of war gaming became
known as free kriegspiel as opposed to
the older version which became known as
rigid creek spiel all of this is
relevant to dungeons and dragons because
there is a similar movement brewing in
rpg spaces right now it's at times been
called ancient school role playing or
arnazonian style based on the play style
of dave arneson who invented the first
fantasy role-playing game but more
recently it's been called free creek
spill renaissance or free creeks build
revival in these fkr role-playing games
immersion and minimalism reign supreme
so a character sheet can be as simple as
just a few lines of description plus
maybe a list of equipment and players
often don't need to know many or any of
the rules at all they simply describe
what they want to do to the dm and the
dm tells them results using any rules
that they want to use or perhaps just
their best judgment you can think of it
as a kind of fork of the osr but with
even less of a loyalty to the rules of
early dungeons and dragons like the osr
the fkr movement doesn't have one single
definition but more of a cluster of
related principles and priorities so one
of the really big ones is that it
focuses strongly on encouraging players
to interact directly with the campaign
world without the intermediary of rules
or abilities on your character sheet in
the way this is one of the reasons why
players don't need to know much or any
of the rules the refrain you hear in a
lot of fkr circles is play worlds not
rules when david wesley or dave arneson
were running one of their fantasy
campaigns in this style they weren't
running a set of rules they were running
a place bronstein or blackmore
respectively if you were a player all
you had to do was imagine that you were
there and then act accordingly the fkr
also frequently encourages diegetic
character progression so what that would
mean is that instead of
character advancement coming from
abstract experience points it's done in
a very concrete way so if you want to
get more powerful you collect more magic
items you find powerful npcs to ally
yourself to you build a stronghold you
get more powerful in the world rather
than through this you know artificial
layer put on top of the game you want to
become more powerful and influential
then figure out how you would do that in
the real world and then do that in the
game now despite its minimalistic
tendencies and fkr game isn't really
rules free rather rules are just seen as
a kind of tool that the dm can take up
and then set aside when they don't need
them anymore rather than as a strict set
of procedures that they have to follow
it's the game world that's really the
focus of any campaign opposed 2d6 roles
are pretty common mostly because those
dice are just easy to find and there's a
nice bell curve there but there's no
necessary reason that you have to use
that you could easily use a d20 one d6
you could use a dice pool or really
whatever you wanted when an uncertain
situation comes up the game master would
simply decide what dice are going to be
used how they're going to be modified
they would resolve the situation and
then move on the point is that rules are
used as the situation calls for them and
serve the unique needs of that campaign
and the people playing you could say
that the fkr uses a table-centric
philosophy of design you can see the osr
principle of rulings not rules at work
here but it's taken even further than
what you typically see in the osr
because even osr games often have
particular procedures that they use
pretty consistently in certain
situations whereas in fkr that wouldn't
necessarily be the case wait but as the
dm i like having those rules and that
structure in place running an fkr game
is not for everybody it simultaneously
demands far more and far less than what
you would usually see in a role-playing
game on the one hand you no longer have
to master complex rules keep track of
encounter balance teach players how to
play or any of that but on the other
hand you're required to have a strong
sense of the internal logic of a game
world you're required to have enough of
a sense of game design you can improvise
rules on the fly you got to be able to
think on your feet to make rulings
consistently and that's not easy for
everybody but without printed rules how
do i know that the gm is playing fair
fkr is a high trust play style requires
that everyone at the table trusts the gm
to be knowledgeable even-handed and
invested in everyone at the table
enjoying the game if that's not true for
the group that you're playing in fkr
just isn't going to work ah but a game
with more fully fleshed out well-rounded
rules makes the world more realistic one
of the goals of playing in an fkr style
is to increase realism not decrease it
as mekel pointed out more than 100 years
before dundas and dragons no rule system
can cover a system as complex as a
complete world so fkr replaces all of
that with a human being who can make
judgment calls that match human
intuition this prevents rules from
creating absurd situations and it covers
all the edge cases that rules can't but
as a player the rules remind me of what
my character can do and how to do it
there's a real trade-off here strict
rules for players allow them to overcome
challenges using a kind of chess-like
tactical sense which a lot of people
really enjoy but fkr just throws that
out the window by not giving players a
lot of rules they're forced to engage
with the world without using the lens of
their character sheet they have to deal
with each situation as it is and come up
with out of the box strategies some
people really like that some people
don't in the end the fkr style exists at
the extreme end of one spectrum and just
isn't going to be for everybody like
anything else in rpgs there's going to
be trade-offs when you adopt one
approach over another even i don't run
games in a full fkr style although i
have adopted some elements of it in my
games if you're interested in learning
more about the style of play i would
check out the free creek spill
revolution discord channel i'll put a
link to that in the description below
they're really friendly and they'll
answer a lot of questions for you i
would also check out john peterson's
masterwork playing at the world if you
want to learn more about these early
fantasy campaigns that were played in
this style i would also check out the
documentary secrets of blackmore if you
want to see a lot of interviews with the
people who played with dave arneson and
who first experienced this kind of
fantasy role playing all right everyone
that's it for today remember to hit the
like subscribe and bell icons if you
want to be notified when questing beast
releases new videos thanks for watching
and i'll see you next time
prussian inventors had become so complex
that hardly anybody played it the game
was originally designed as a training
tool for young officers but at this
point finding senior officers with
battlefield experience willing to put in
the time to learn the rules and referee
the game had become nearly impossible
lieutenant wilhelm jacob meckle was
dissatisfied with the situation and
identified a number of problems with the
game as it stood first of all the rules
of the game limited the referee a
referee in creek's bill was expected to
be an experienced battlefield officer
whose job was to take the orders sent to
him by the players and then translate
that into action on the game battlefield
however the strictness of the rules of
the game often prevented them from using
that real world experience in
determining the results
secondly he pointed out that the rules
of the game could not even in theory
accurately model the conditions of a
real battlefield the world is infinitely
complex and cannot be reduced down to
just a series of rules players would
always be trying things that were
outside of the rules and situations
would be cropping up that the rules
didn't cover
thirdly the detailed calculations that
the game required were often tedious
they slowed the game down and they
didn't make that much of a difference
anyway occasionally you would run into
these absurd situations where the
playing of the creek spiel the war game
would take longer than fighting the
actual battle in real life to resolve
this mecca proposed eliminating most of
the rules of the game and instead
relying much more heavily on the
battlefield experience of the referee
rather than consulting a lot of charts
and graphs to resolve a situation the
referee would examine what was going on
make a quick ruling based on what they
thought was the most likely outcome and
the game would quickly move on from
there
so this would make the game a lot faster
it would make it a lot more accessible
and hopefully make it more realistic as
well this form of war gaming became
known as free kriegspiel as opposed to
the older version which became known as
rigid creek spiel all of this is
relevant to dungeons and dragons because
there is a similar movement brewing in
rpg spaces right now it's at times been
called ancient school role playing or
arnazonian style based on the play style
of dave arneson who invented the first
fantasy role-playing game but more
recently it's been called free creek
spill renaissance or free creeks build
revival in these fkr role-playing games
immersion and minimalism reign supreme
so a character sheet can be as simple as
just a few lines of description plus
maybe a list of equipment and players
often don't need to know many or any of
the rules at all they simply describe
what they want to do to the dm and the
dm tells them results using any rules
that they want to use or perhaps just
their best judgment you can think of it
as a kind of fork of the osr but with
even less of a loyalty to the rules of
early dungeons and dragons like the osr
the fkr movement doesn't have one single
definition but more of a cluster of
related principles and priorities so one
of the really big ones is that it
focuses strongly on encouraging players
to interact directly with the campaign
world without the intermediary of rules
or abilities on your character sheet in
the way this is one of the reasons why
players don't need to know much or any
of the rules the refrain you hear in a
lot of fkr circles is play worlds not
rules when david wesley or dave arneson
were running one of their fantasy
campaigns in this style they weren't
running a set of rules they were running
a place bronstein or blackmore
respectively if you were a player all
you had to do was imagine that you were
there and then act accordingly the fkr
also frequently encourages diegetic
character progression so what that would
mean is that instead of
character advancement coming from
abstract experience points it's done in
a very concrete way so if you want to
get more powerful you collect more magic
items you find powerful npcs to ally
yourself to you build a stronghold you
get more powerful in the world rather
than through this you know artificial
layer put on top of the game you want to
become more powerful and influential
then figure out how you would do that in
the real world and then do that in the
game now despite its minimalistic
tendencies and fkr game isn't really
rules free rather rules are just seen as
a kind of tool that the dm can take up
and then set aside when they don't need
them anymore rather than as a strict set
of procedures that they have to follow
it's the game world that's really the
focus of any campaign opposed 2d6 roles
are pretty common mostly because those
dice are just easy to find and there's a
nice bell curve there but there's no
necessary reason that you have to use
that you could easily use a d20 one d6
you could use a dice pool or really
whatever you wanted when an uncertain
situation comes up the game master would
simply decide what dice are going to be
used how they're going to be modified
they would resolve the situation and
then move on the point is that rules are
used as the situation calls for them and
serve the unique needs of that campaign
and the people playing you could say
that the fkr uses a table-centric
philosophy of design you can see the osr
principle of rulings not rules at work
here but it's taken even further than
what you typically see in the osr
because even osr games often have
particular procedures that they use
pretty consistently in certain
situations whereas in fkr that wouldn't
necessarily be the case wait but as the
dm i like having those rules and that
structure in place running an fkr game
is not for everybody it simultaneously
demands far more and far less than what
you would usually see in a role-playing
game on the one hand you no longer have
to master complex rules keep track of
encounter balance teach players how to
play or any of that but on the other
hand you're required to have a strong
sense of the internal logic of a game
world you're required to have enough of
a sense of game design you can improvise
rules on the fly you got to be able to
think on your feet to make rulings
consistently and that's not easy for
everybody but without printed rules how
do i know that the gm is playing fair
fkr is a high trust play style requires
that everyone at the table trusts the gm
to be knowledgeable even-handed and
invested in everyone at the table
enjoying the game if that's not true for
the group that you're playing in fkr
just isn't going to work ah but a game
with more fully fleshed out well-rounded
rules makes the world more realistic one
of the goals of playing in an fkr style
is to increase realism not decrease it
as mekel pointed out more than 100 years
before dundas and dragons no rule system
can cover a system as complex as a
complete world so fkr replaces all of
that with a human being who can make
judgment calls that match human
intuition this prevents rules from
creating absurd situations and it covers
all the edge cases that rules can't but
as a player the rules remind me of what
my character can do and how to do it
there's a real trade-off here strict
rules for players allow them to overcome
challenges using a kind of chess-like
tactical sense which a lot of people
really enjoy but fkr just throws that
out the window by not giving players a
lot of rules they're forced to engage
with the world without using the lens of
their character sheet they have to deal
with each situation as it is and come up
with out of the box strategies some
people really like that some people
don't in the end the fkr style exists at
the extreme end of one spectrum and just
isn't going to be for everybody like
anything else in rpgs there's going to
be trade-offs when you adopt one
approach over another even i don't run
games in a full fkr style although i
have adopted some elements of it in my
games if you're interested in learning
more about the style of play i would
check out the free creek spill
revolution discord channel i'll put a
link to that in the description below
they're really friendly and they'll
answer a lot of questions for you i
would also check out john peterson's
masterwork playing at the world if you
want to learn more about these early
fantasy campaigns that were played in
this style i would also check out the
documentary secrets of blackmore if you
want to see a lot of interviews with the
people who played with dave arneson and
who first experienced this kind of
fantasy role playing all right everyone
that's it for today remember to hit the
like subscribe and bell icons if you
want to be notified when questing beast
releases new videos thanks for watching
and i'll see you next time
Last edited:
Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
Believe what you want, and I'll do the same. My decisions are not based on making the rules widget always work.
Gammadoodler
Hero
Sure. That's fine. We all have our "bridge too far" stuff.
I just typically find the application of real world logic to fantasy creatures in fantasy settings to be a quagmire. Such "logic" often doesn't hold up well to any kind of inspection and it most cases, it probably shouldn't.. because fantasy.
overgeeked
Open-World Sandbox
The video darjr linked mostly covers it. For me, the focus is on Ben's second point, around 40 seconds in. No set of rules can possibly cover how the real world works and the players are always getting up to nonsense. So, skip the rulebook and make decisions. If you need rules, make them up or pull them from other games. Get the rules out of the way so you can play the game. Play worlds, not rules. Etc.
There's no trip ability as such in 4e that I recall. There are various powers that knock creatures prone, but at low levels I don't think it's common to be able to knock prone at will.
I just had a look at some 5e statblocks: it seems that gelatinous cubes are immune to the prone condition, but snakes are not. I don't see that someone deciding that a 4e cube is immune to prone, should that be their preference, is going to break the game in a way that the 5e rule doesn't.
The Deathlock Wight's Horrific Visage does untyped damage in the MM. This seems obviously an error - it should be Psychic damage, and that correction was made in a later Essentials-era update. I don't recall for sure, but I think I made this change myself when I first used a Deathlock Wight in an encounter (which was pre-Essentials).
There is something slightly ironic about relying on the imprimatur of the rules to make house rulings to monster stat blocks!
Leaving aside puzzles about what the logic is of real-world giant acidic cubes, it seems to me that a spatula can be used to knock over a cube: particularly as, presumably, its "body" engages in some sort of contraction or deformation as it moves.
The only forced-movement effects used against gelatinous cubes that I recall in my 4e play were from a polearm-wielding fighter, so I didn't, and still don't, see any problem.
Mannahnin
Scion of Murgen (He/Him)
Who said "need", exactly? I said I like them. I find them useful. I find that having some defined rules or at least guidelines encourages players to engage with the concept, in part because it helps them engage more with the setting. Give a person a set of instructions for how to do a thing and it's always going to be easier for them.
Obviously we can do the whole thing freeform, but as @overgeeked (among others) has observed of, say, dungeon exploration, actually having procedures of play makes it more accessible and helps the players make informed decisions.
I like your house rule for a default time passage between adventures, FWIW. It seems like a nice minimalist alternative to the default 5E rules not requiring any particular downtime for leveling, recuperation between adventures, etc. I'm glad you found an easy way to patch that gap which is satisfying and sufficient for your table.
Would you prefer to write all the rules from scratch for a game, or use a well-designed set by a writer and designer whose work you respect and enjoy?
I get that you do some FKR now, but come on. I know you like B/X and other written systems. This shouldn't be that challenging for you to grok- that having a good system to add downtime more normally to the gameplay loop can have benefits similar in kind (if not in degree) to having defined gameplay procedures for exploration. I know if a 5E player told you "I don't see the point of dungeon crawl procedures- just wing it or use skill checks!" you wouldn't buy it.
Last edited:
Alzrius
The EN World kitten
It's an intriguing concept, but I wonder how well it works with regard to playing spellcasters, or other PCs who possess magical powers (that don't come from items).
James Gasik
We don't talk about Pun-Pun
4e discussions usually end up like this; whether someone liked or disliked the system has less to do with cold hard facts but emotions. "It didn't feel like D&D to me, so I didn't like it".
Much like with politics or religion, you can't really debate emotions. There is no logical, well-thought out, reasoned argument that will make people who didn't like 4e go "oh, I see, I was completely wrong!". Even if you dispel one problem someone has with it ("it's too much like WOW", "every character was the same", "it lost money"), they'll likely just bring up another negative trait.
The reality of what the heck happened with 4th edition is simple; the people who liked 3.x didn't really want a new D&D, they just wanted a better version of 3.x. The people who didn't like 3.x wanted a D&D without WotC's "improvements" and were probably already playing that game in some form.
The Powers That Be demanded that completely new books be sold and invalidate the old ones, because that's how businesses make money. So the design team gave us not the next year's model of D&D, but an Edsel. Something so completely different than expectations that the people who liked 3.x were confused why they should give up playing the game they liked, and people who didn't like 3.x had even less of a reason to try it.
So you were always going to get a lukewarm reception; people quickly gravitated to some reason why "this wasn't their D&D". I was this way myself; I looked at the PHB, played a session of 4e, and said "nah" for 1-2 years. Then I found myself playing D&D Encounters, by which time there were plenty of very interesting things going on, saw how 4e solved a lot of problems I've had with my 3.x games, and changed my mind. What I later realized was, when 4e came out, I wasn't ready for a new game.
A year or two later, I had 3.x fatigue and I was. But by then, the battle lines had been drawn, the pro and anti-4e factions were firmly entrenched, and it's traits, positive and negative, real and imagined, were now ammunition for a holy war of sorts. And even today, the veterans of that conflict are bitter.
The people who liked 4e lost the war, not to the other side, but to the almighty dollar. And so it's become our Lost Cause.
